Rory Gold

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Figuring out your odds of winning a given pot is the single most important calculation in poker. Basically if the percentage chance of you winning a particular pot is greater than the percentage of a pot your bet equates to, you are going to win a lot of money playing online poker.

There you go, you just figured out how to play winning online poker. Of course, this is a pretty simple calculation when you flop a strong, made hand; top pair or three of a kind is likely to be in the lead, so make your bets. Figuring out when the math is good (or ‘when you have the best of it’) despite being behind in the hand is a little trickier.

Let’s do a sample hand.

You hold Kd9d against one opponent, the pot is at $100 and the flop comes Ad-7d-2s. Your lone opponent, a fairly tight player who raised preflop from mid-position and who you don’t think would bet with nothing, makes a $50 wager.

At this point, it seems likely your opponent has an ace, good for a pair. That pair is so good, in fact, that even if you hit one of your pairs on the turn, you’ll still be behind.

There’s a very small chance you could hit two pairs or three of a kind with the help of the turn or the river, but the math is small enough that it’s better to ignore that possibility for our purposes here that worry about it too much. Thinking about those runner-runner draws will only cost you money in the long run.

With no straight draws in play, we have one real way to win; a flush. We’ve been fortunately enough to find ourselves with four diamonds on the flop, and the king in our hand ensures that, in the unlikely scenario where they also have two diamonds and the third diamond comes on board, our flush will be the better one. For general purposes, we’re going to assume they have the ace and not the diamonds.

Knowing our two cards, the three cards on the board and the ace we’re guessing they have in their hand, that’s six cards that have been accounted for in the deck. That means there are forty-six cards unaccounted for. The deck holds 13 cards of each suit, there are nine diamonds left we could draw to get our flush and take the hand down.

If you are ready to play Online Poker get a free $550 from Doyle Brunson.

Stay Gold

Rory Gold